


to a future, polysemic

by devicing



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Established Relationship, Introspection, Iwaizumi POV, M/M, Spoilers for chapter 402, there's another thing i want to tag here but that's the crux of the fic so spoilers, this is the schmoopiest thing I've written for this site by far, time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devicing/pseuds/devicing
Summary: “Not much longer now,” Oikawa breathes beside him, unaware. From high above them, the sun draws a golden dayglow out of the deep brown of his eyes, trained on the path ahead. They have only ever known to look forward, after all, to stay fixed on summits, always just out of reach.Hajime understands the sentiment. “Yeah,” he agrees, his own gaze held on Oikawa.On the polysemic nature of plant seeds, Greek mythology, and finish lines.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 9
Kudos: 75





	to a future, polysemic

**Author's Note:**

> I spent far too much time researching for this, considering the final wordcount

His third year at UC Irvine, Hajime walks into the library to find a display set up in the entryway. His eyes track to it dutifully in a way they never would have back in the easy comforts of Miyagi. Here however, on the never-ending expanse of a Pacific shoreline so vastly different from the one he’d come to know in Sendai, he has learned to embrace the mundane. Food labels in grocery stores, months-old notices on campus message boards, advertisements on busses—he gives them all the due diligence they deserve, each one a chance to prove to himself the fruits of his labors.

He is picking up the English language, slowly but surely.

The display, he deduces with an ease that makes his pride swell even three years in, is of books published by Irvine alumni, each one basking in the hazy, California sun. There is always challenge in the mundane, he reminds himself, then grabs the most interesting looking cover and tucks it under his arm.

He checks the book out in mid-October, but English is still slow going and tiresome, and he still has classwork on top of everything else. It takes him a month just to get through the first chapter, pushing himself through page after page, his computer a sea of dictionary tabs and search-engine references.

It’s half-way through Thanksgiving break—too short to be worth the inevitable jet lag of traveling home—that in his boredom, he cracks the book open again to stubbornly push the rest of the way through another chapter.

His goal is a single-minded one, and his focus is so fixed that when he hits the chapter’s last sentence, it takes him a moment for the words to catch up. He’s halfway through the motion of triumphantly flinging the book away from him when they do. Lowering his hand back into his lap, thumb pressed between crisp pages so they fan out under the lamplight, he reads the line over once more.

 _Forget about what you are escaping from,_ it says. _Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to._

It’s a late-November afternoon. The air is a balmy 72 degrees, as it wafts in through the window, and the late-day California sun grins lazily against the nape of his neck, across skin that has welcomed its kisses eagerly over the years.

Two days earlier, Miyagi had welcomed its first snowfall. Three years earlier than that, fresh off of licking the wounds of a final failed shot at Interhigh, Hajime had clutched a well-worn copy of an Utsui Takashi book against his fluttering chest and let loose his aspirations like shot in the dark. The click of the mouse as he’d hit the submit button on his UCI application had certainly rung out as loudly as gunfire at the time.

Hajime reads over the line again. Something in the quote resonates deep within him. It is a familiarity that sings out, _I know._

* * *

  
For the 18 years before he had left Miyagi, Hajime had had a very rigid understanding of the concept of home. Home as he had understood it was a two-story house in a distant Sendai suburb across the street from the neighborhood bathhouse and only one street down from his best friend. Home had been a solitary castle filled with squeaky floorboards, frayed _tatami_ , and the vinegary smell of homemade _kimchi_ and _tsukemono_. It was something concrete, something known.

That house still stands, and it will always be home—his stubbornness an inheritance from his parents, too sedentary to ever move. Now, though, he thinks of home a bit differently. Home is less a building, and more like the creeping vines that Seijou had stitched into every fiber of his being. It is a system of roots that had dug deep into the loamy soil of Sendai until they had grown brilliant flower-heads under the watchful care of those around him. And when Hajime had chased dreams out across the far reaches of the globe, Home had let loose a thousand dandelion seeds, whose tufted heads had been carried along on the wind after him.

Not just him, he thinks, as the Argentinian summer heat sticks to his skin, only compounded by the searing trail of Oikawa’s tongue and teeth and the humidity of his breath against the hollow of Hajime’s throat. Perhaps, like tiny passengers, those seeds had traveled the winds elsewhere and sown themselves into others as well. They live in the back-corner table of the _izakaya_ haunt Hanamaki drags him to every time he makes a layover in Tokyo, and the empty _Kirin Ichiban_ bottles left behind in that hidden cove on the Matsushima Bay. The one that Matsukawa had driven them all to after graduation in his father’s beat-up farm truck.

They live here, especially, in every hidden corner of this small San Juan apartment. In the monster flick DVDs stacked next to the TV. In the dirty dishes that once held fried tofu made far-too expensive by import taxes and all the more delicious for it. In the suspiciously familiar UCI sweatshirt whose sleeves look just a size too small on Oikawa’s arms as he reaches them up to hurriedly yank the article up over his head. He eclipses the lamplight like Icarus before the sun, the glow a faint halo behind him.

Hajime’s suitcase, dutifully packed up once more and waiting for him in the entryway like a solitary sentinel, is an afterthought in this moment.

The sun is long set, but Hajime still feels its presence on the breeze, in the sun-soaked warmth of Oikawa’s skin as he reaches up to trail desperate hands along the man’s sides and thumb at the pulse humming through him like a summer cicada. In Irvine, the nights bring a chill, but there is no reprieve from the summer heat here as Oikawa leans over him and slots their lips together, breathing dandelion-seeds into his mouth and their roots deep into his lungs.

 _You know this_ , they whisper as they bloom, _that this too is Home._

* * *

In the second year of his fellowship, as Hajime is ushering out the final student athlete on the docket for the day, Coach Utsui finally broaches the subject. Seated backwards in his chair, arms draped over the back with a curious look in his eye, he asks Hajime, _So, why sports medicine?_

It would be easiest to fall into his own chair, shrug, and give the usual false-humility response he’s grown so used to. The one that says _Too much talent on the market, and as they say, those that can’t do, teach._

And that’s because the truth—the one that always catches behind the tight clench of his throat, too strikingly honest and embarrassing to give voice—is that it wasn’t ever a decision, but a duty. An inevitability, blossomed over time like a Himalayan lily, years in the making.

The truth is that at sixteen, Oikawa—festering in his absolute worst—had soared beyond Hajime’s reach, only to plummet from the sky like Icarus too close to the sun. There had been no scattered feathers or candle wax spattered across the gymnasium floor in the aftermath. Only the broken body of his best friend, spilled out like a cut-string marionette in the wake of his self-destruction.

At sixteen, hands hovering over the gruesome sight of Oikawa’s dislocated patella, he had been forced to face a simple but debilitating truth: that this was a problem brazen ingenuity and youthful confidence alone could not fix. That for the first time in his sixteen years, he felt well and truly powerless. There was nothing to be side-stepped, nothing to be puzzled out—simply the barrier of entry to a wellspring of knowledge he was still too young to understand, and the clawing guilt of recognizing that this had been the inevitable coda to a problem he had had all the time in the world to stop had he only paid enough attention.

A week later, wandering the Sendai Mediatheque with Oikawa’s sister and a babbling Takeru at his side as they waited for Oikawa’s week-three appointment to wrap up, he’d discovered Utsui’s third book— _Finding Strength in Adversity—_ and had honed in on a single chapter title. More specifically, on the familiar echo of the doctor’s voice around the words _patellar subluxation_ that had been rattling around his mind for weeks.

Sixteen-year-old Hajime had not known that that book, that Sendai trip, that fateful injury, would set into motion the strange Rube Goldberg machine that had gotten him here to this very day. To this wobbly stool in a training room in Southern California, seated across from the author himself. At the time, he’d simply sat himself down at one of the library’s many tables, tracing curious eyes across foreign medical words and idle fingertips across his own knee in intricate tape patterns. Imagining a future where he might be able to forge wax and feathers back together in spite of an errant heart and a vengeful sun.

In the present, he falls into his chair across from his mentor, fights past the clamp of his throat, still so desperate to remain unknown, and admits the truth.

Because no matter how many ways the story is told, Icarus will always fly too close to the sun. The wax will always melt, his wings will always scatter. Icarus will always fall, but he does not have to drown in the churning water below.

And even if Ushijima had never told Hajime of their past, there is something distinctly fatherly in the crinkle of Coach Utsui’s eyes as he reaches into his back pocket and slides an envelope across the table towards him. 

The indigo circle of _ichimatsu moyo._ The five interwoven rings below. The heavy, monumental weight of a date: _2020_.

* * *

The astronaut on Oikawa’s shirt is suspended among the broad, expanding galaxy of his chest, fabric stretched taut across muscles honed from a lifetime of setting. In his thickly-gloved hands, he holds up a sign that reads _I NEED SPACE._ It’s the most incongruous thing Hajime can imagine knowing he can still feel the warm imprint of Oikawa’s hands at his shoulders where they’d coaxed him along, along his forearm where they’d hoisted him across crevices and creek beds, across his palms where their hands had found each other like magnets a thousand times over over the course of the hours-long trek it has taken them to get this far.

Hajime is no stranger to hiking. In California, he had kept a list of state parks and had challenged himself to visit every single one by the time he’d moved back to Japan. He managed to make it to 27—a far cry from the 300 all the websites boasted—but it felt victorious nonetheless. Hiking was like chasing a remnant of his volleyball days. Sometimes he would reach the summit, peer out across a vast expanse of evergreens or ocean waves, and swear he could feel the familiar sting of synthetic leather in the ridges of his palms. He’d chased the sensation relentlessly.

Loping on ahead with the giddiness of his long-gone teenage self, Oikawa barely manages to keep himself upright as his foot hits a patch of loose gravel and he pitches dangerously sideways. The tiny stones trickle down to greet Hajime, still ten-steps behind.

“Swear to god, if you fall to your death here, I _will_ kill you.”

Oikawa angles a familiar smirk back down at him. It’s filled with a familiar, wry fondness tempered by years of Hajime’s familiar, empty threats. He calls back, “When we’re so close to the finish line? _Please._ That’d be far too ironic.”

 _Finish line_. As he hauls himself up over another granite boulder, peering up at the ridge still looming far ahead of them, Hajime works his hand anxiously in his pocket and realizes that in this moment—in this year in particular—the term _finish line_ is a polysemous thing.

His neck aches against the heft of his hiking pack. His pockets feel heavy. His feet ache too, but something in the wind-swept flush of Oikawa’s cheeks and the brilliance of his smile keeps Hajime stubbornly biting at his heels.

As he sidles up next to him, Oikawa falls into step beside him. An easy syncopation after years of practice— _inspiration and expiration_. “You’re getting a little out of shape in your old age, Iwa-chan.”

Hajime snorts against the low-oxygen burn in his chest. “Yeah, and you’re getting a little ugly in yours,” he grunts.

Oikawa laughs and bumps their shoulders together, the pull of a well-known gravity.

They carry on. Oikawa talks of lengthy sets against _Bolívar_ and _Libertad_ , of sunburns and the best _choripán_ this side of the Andes. Hajime talks of his cramped apartment in Minato ward, of Hanamaki’s latest job search and the hot-spring resorts in Beppu he’d visited on the Adlers’ last attempt to recruit him. The Patagonian peaks are quiet company around them as they climb steadily upwards. Their heads peer over the ridge line, growing in scale with every step the two of them take, and kind as they are, their gazes add a heavy weight to the load Hajime already carries. He swallows against the sensation, thickly.

“Not much longer now,” Oikawa breathes beside him, unaware. From high above them, the sun draws a golden dayglow out of the deep brown of his eyes, trained on the path ahead as they have been this whole time. They have only ever known to look forward, after all, to stay fixed on summits, always just out of reach.

Hajime understands the sentiment. “Yeah,” he agrees, his own gaze held on Oikawa. 

They trudge onwards. Oikawa forges a single-minded path, ever-fixed on the destination. It is a familiar sight, both comfort and caution, and it is all Hajime can do to be the stalwart presence that follows after.

Only when he is just about to crest the ridge of the valley does Oikawa slow to a stop up ahead, his resolute momentum trailing off and the cut of his broad shoulders dipping down softly. His pack slips down his arms and to the ground like an afterthought, and when he turns, there’s something indescribable in his expression. A fathomless _something_ somehow held in his small, wondrous smile.

For all his unwavering pursuit only moments before, he steps back just shy of the goal, extending a hand. The callouses across his fingertips are rough around Hajime’s forearm as they grip tightly and hoist him up the final steps together.

Snow glistens along the mountain tops and down along the sides of the basin, cupped like pious hands around the lake at its center. Wind whispers across the mountaintop. The gentle aquamarine waters of _Laguna de los Tres_ shimmer in the midday sunlight.

Oikawa shakes his head incredulously. “You jerk,” he murmurs, gaze transfixed, “I knew you had something up your sleeve, dragging us all the way out here.”

“The colors,” Hajime says, and the tight reediness of it has nothing to do with the altitude. “Kind of makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa’s mouth softens. “Yeah, it sure does.”

Hajime is glad that comfortable silence slips in to fill the space between them. He doesn’t know how exactly he would put into words the fact that it’s not just the Seijou green of the waters, but the Argentinian blue of the skies. It’s the endless expanse of Patagonia around them, and a horizon that has no discernible end. It’s their intertwined root systems, spanning both people and continents alike. It’s the polysemous nature of the words _finish line_ , and how this summit was never what either he or Oikawa meant by it.

He thumbs at the gentle weight in his pocket, then with all the oxygen he can muster, he opens his mouth to speak.

Only to be cut off, as Oikawa whips out a hand to grip his elbow like a vice.

Hajime starts, turning aside. “Hey, _To_ —!”

Wind-bitten hands cup his cheeks, chased by an achingly warm mouth against his own. Hajime sucks down dandelion seeds with every fervent, urgent mash of Oikawa’s lips and feels sunlight against his skin as their foreheads fit together. As Oikawa rocks his head back and forth in a gentle rhythm, their noses brush together like gentle Inuit kisses.

“No no no no no,” he murmurs in a soft, frantic litany, kneading his palms desperately across the curve of Hajime’s jaw. They hem him in like a secret, a perfect mirror of the snowcaps gentle hands. “Not _no_ -no, just—,” his eyes are bright and shimmer like the water below when the desperate knit of his brow unfurls, “—not _yet_.”

And it’s all he needs to say. Hajime relaxes his white knuckled grip, but does not let go. He slips his hand out of his pocket and reaches up to fit it around Oikawa’s jaw. He can tell from the way his brown eyes blow wide that he must feel the circular imprint and the whisper of a chain against the skin there.

“You bastard.” Hajime’s grin blooms across his face, bright and ferocious enough to ache. “You absolute _bastard_ , are you _really_ going to make me wait another five months?”

It takes a moment, then Oikawa laughs wetly, the petals of his own smile folding open to match. His fingers scrape through the short hair at Hajime’s nape. “Could be longer,” the words quiver out if him. “I’ve heard how deadly my competition is going to be.”

“Yeah? And who told you that?”

“Mmm,” he hums, and Hajime can feel the vibration resonate through him. Through their hands, through their bones, through their intertwined roots. “A little birdie. He can be very, _very_ vocal when coaxed the right wa— _!_ ”

He is broken off by Hajime’s palms, mashing his cheeks inwards, as well as his own hiccuping laughter. The sound is wildly infectious as it echoes through the basin, and soon Hajime can’t help but give into it himself, two bubbling streams coalescing into one.

* * *

The 1DK apartment Hajime rents in Minato has a double stove-top, a decently deep bathtub, and enough room for a full-sized futon. It stands a five minute walk from the nearest station, and a ten minute jog to Tokyo Tower. The convenience store next to the entrance lives up to its name, and the old lady who runs the grocery store down the block occasionally slips him a mikan or two. _Because you remind me of my grandson_ , she tells him. The building is twelve stories tall with only one elevator, so most days he takes the stairs all the way up to his eighth floor apartment. In other words, it’s enough.

His windows face east, so Hajime rises with the sun. Over breakfast, he slides the balcony door open just to try to catch a breeze before the summer heat bakes the city to boiling and look out over Tokyo Bay. It’s routine, at this point. The sight of the sunrise on the water, the slowly-building sound of the city stirring to life, the predictable loop of the trains as they roll across Rainbow Bridge towards Odaiba—all have become familiar, seven months in.

The Ariake Arena is also familiar, now, where it lingers across the water. He’s watched the morning sunlight catch on its sloping roof from his tiny balcony, and has accompanied the National team on four separate tours of the facilities in the past month alone. In a way, the building, like everything else in his Tokyo life, should be commonplace by now, both inside and out.

But here in the moment, stepping out onto the court, he realizes the foolishness of the thought. Because an arena is never just a building—it is a tilling ground, sown with the seeds of anticipation and cultivated through the cries of its spectators and the blood, sweat, and tears of its competitors. This is a truth that has lived at his core since the day he traded bug nets for knee pads, and one that sings through him every time he’s taken court-side since. How ridiculous, that he had ever thought he could forget this feeling when it has echoed within him for so long.

Just ahead of him, the starting lineup of the National Team cuts an imposing red line against the the backdrop as they take in the sight together. There is history in the making with this team, he knows. Each player carries a story with them carried on the backs of aspirations and rivalries, both new and old. Some that had been long-intertwined with his own and others that were only just now threading together. The roaring of the crowd sweeps through the arena like a tsunami wave, but even it must break across the sharp cut of these men’s shoulders and the ferocity of their presence.

Hajime has forged these weapons, tempered the steel within them a thousand times over—each one sharp as a katana blade and made just flexible enough to bend. Everything he’s put into them—every drop of knowledge wrung from textbooks and experience, from teammates and mentors alike—has been done for this moment. For this singular stage.

And selfishly, he thinks—as the double doors across the court swing open—a little bit for himself, as well. Because while he may not be taking to the court himself, his roots have taken hold in the muscles and the bones of this team— _his_ team.

This is his challenge, and he proudly places it on full display for its approaching challenger.

Argentina-blue looks _good_ painted across Oikawa’s chest in broad strokes, but the confidence he wears like a second skin outshines everything else in spades. As he steps out onto the court and the announcer rattles off introductions, the crowd erupts. They are a sea of Argentinian flags behind him with their _Sol de Mayo_ emblems fluttering like a galaxy of stars on the water.

At 27, Oikawa is both an echo of his past self and not. Looking at him feels like watching two layers of film overlapped—the faint outline of what he used to be only reflects the stark contrast of who he has become like negative film. This time on this stage, there is no playing to the crowd—no flirty peace signs and coquettish winks at lovestruck fans. This Oikawa is a product of his age, and of the years of hardship that had led him here. He is a man returned to his homeland, made all the better for having cast it off. He is the stalwart pillar of the Argentinian team, Hajime thinks, fierce and magnificent _._

Both teams take to the court, and suddenly the air seems to thin as the seconds count down. It is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Even Hajime can feel his chest grow tight.

Once, Oikawa had been called a king, but never has he looked more regal and resplendent than he does in this moment, with the weight of the world on his shoulders no longer a burden, but a blessing. As he takes center stage, he idly spins the ball between his hands, surveying the court with a casual sweep of his eyes to the steady, _whoosh-thump_ rhythm of the leather against his palms. And it might be because he knows that tempo like his own, but Hajime can see the Argentinian team fall in sync with his practiced cadence, breathing suddenly in practiced time.It is a thing of perfect harmony, built on unwavering trust.

In this moment, Oikawa is known and he is _loved,_ and Hajime cannot look away.

And it’s a good thing, too, because from where he stands on the back line, the brilliance of the arena lighting suddenly catches on the whisper of a thin chain around Oikawa’s neck and a familiar, circular puckering under the fabric of his uniform, right at the center of his breastbone. It is a small detail, meant only for an audience of one, but one that feels magnanimous in its brazen presence.

Oikawa’s gaze suddenly tips sideways and—like a compass needle drawn north—it finds Hajime. It trails over his eyes, his mouth, down to the matching glint of metal sitting just above the third knuckle of Hajime’s left hand. There, it lingers for a beat too long. No doubt he knows—its presence there is equal parts present challenge, future promise.

When he looks up, Hajime remembers, suddenly, a truth he’s always known about Oikawa. It is one that has carried them both through so many journeys, both solitary and not, over the years and across the world—that Oikawa’s eyes have only ever known to look forward, to stay fixed on summits, just out of reach.

Perhaps, he thinks, there are no _finish_ _lines_ in this life of theirs, not when every line crossed is another journey yet begun.

Oikawa’s hands close around the volleyball, heavy and sure. _Just watch me_ , his smile—wide and wild and absolutely radiant—says.

And in the returning slice of a grin he shoots court-bound, Hajime replies, _I always have._

The referee’s whistle pierces the air, and—defiant of the sun—Icarus soars.

**Author's Note:**

> 402 releasing on Oikawa's birthday made me absolutely feral, and this garbled mess was the result of all my free time and brainpower outside of work. Also of note, this is baby's first <5000 word fic, as well as baby's first fic written in under a week—go figure! 
> 
> [@devicing](https://twitter.com/devicing) on Twitter


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